This is an aside titled 'Jessa Crispin on blogging vs. criticism' dated 10/30/09

No one voice is as valuable to books right now as Jessa Crispin’s: “The New York Times is a gatekeeper, absolutely. And for someone who has so much control over the conversation, you’d think Sam Tanenhaus would be less defensive, and less likely to look like he might leap over the table and rip out the throat of the man who called the Review “middlebrow,” but whatever. If you look at the statistics of what they’re letting inside the gates, though, you see mostly books published by Random House, a very small handful of translated fiction, a disproportionate number of white men…[So] many of the contemporary authors I love are often the ones being kept out of the conversation. They’re rarely, if ever, reviewed in the New York Times, they don’t get splashy features written about them and their night out with their friends. It’s hard for me to get worked up about the decline of reviews when I didn’t care much for them to begin with.”

Posted by Joanne on Oct. 30, 2009 Tagged: , , ,

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